This invention relates generally to vehicle maintenance systems and, more specifically, to data acquisition relating to vehicle condition.
Total life cycle costs for vehicles includes costs for operating and maintaining the vehicles. In many instances, vehicles must be inspected before maintenance can be performed on the vehicles.
A significant portion of the cost of inspecting vehicles, such as aircraft, for corrosion, stress or other damage is associated with obtaining access to hidden parts of the vehicle""s structure. For example, for a 747-400 commercial transport aircraft over 36,000 labor hours are spent inspecting the aircraft for fatigue cracks and corrosion. Of these, 25,000 hours are spent inspecting for corrosion. Over 21,000 hours or 84% of these hours are spent gaining access to hard to inspect areas, and only 16% or 4000 hours are spent doing the actual inspection. In addition, added costs are associated with incidental damage that may be inflicted upon the structure while gaining access to hidden areas.
Therefore, there is a need to develop a system and process for reducing the time to complete vehicle inspections.
The invention provides a system and method for reducing structural condition maintenance costs by monitoring vehicle condition in real-time.
The present invention is a system and method for monitoring conditions of a vehicle and generating a maintenance plan according to the monitored conditions. The system includes one or more sensors and a data acquisition unit located within the vehicle. The one or more sensors generate signals of a condition from various locations within the vehicle. The data acquisition unit stores the generated sensor signals at a first sampling rate. The system also includes a structural condition management system that receives the stored sensor signals from the data acquisition unit. The structural condition management system is external to the vehicle. The structural condition management system processes the transmitted sensor signals based on one or more associated predefined condition assessment algorithms and generates a maintenance plan based on the processed sensor signals.
The data acquisition unit determines if the generated sensor signals need to be stored at a sampling rate different than the first sampling rate. The generated sensor signals are stored at a sampling rate different than the first sampling rate, if it is determined the stored sensor signals need to be stored at a different sampling rate.
The one or more sensors suitably include at least one of a corrosion, humidity, pH, chloride ion (Clxe2x88x92), metal ion, temperature, acceleration, stress, strain, pressure, load, or force sensor.